“The consensus that WordPress has better SEO is a guess…WordPress fans will guess one way, Drupal fans the other. In my opinion, WordPress SEO plugins work better for sites which are short on skill or time or money. If you want to give your clients hand-made quality, Drupal does rather a good job. This also goes for SEO. Nevertheless, lack of developer skill and client budget does sometimes mean we are better off simply ‘reheating’ and rolling out the wonderful prepackaged solutions available for WordPress.” (Slightly paraphrased for clarity.)

If you’re reading this post, I will assume that you’ve already decided to migrate your site to WordPress. Rather than re-hashing the Drupal versus WordPress SEO debate, I’ll focus on some technical details that affect your SEO efforts when migrating from Drupal to WordPress. First, let’s start with some basics.

Can I preserve my SEO during the migration?

The quick answer is, ‘Yes’. It is possible to preserve search engine optimisation during a migration. However, it can be easy to overlook the idea that you might end up with better SEO by revisiting your approach entirely. I’ve had site migrations where replicating optimisations from the Drupal version wouldn’t have made a significant impact in the business—or at the very least, where SEO was something that could be improved after the migration. If your site falls into this category, I would not recommend putting too much into preserving your Drupal optimisations. The money spent hiring me or anyone else may be better spent on improving the WordPress SEO after exporting your Drupal content.

There are some easy and low-cost approaches you can take such as:

Using or building an SEO-friendly and responsive WordPress theme.

Installing SEO WordPress plugins.

Creating higher quality content.

Improving page load times. WordPress is a lighter CMS so you should get this ‘out of the box’ but you can lose any gains if, for example, you replicate calls to third-party libraries.

Of course, you should consult an expert if you rely heavily on search traffic. Preserving SEO may be vital for your site but it’s worth making a conscious assessment about the investment needed.

What kind of work is involved in preserving SEO?

The underlying differences between Drupal and WordPress mean preserving SEO often takes the bulk of a migration budget. The amount of work needed depends on what you’re trying to preserve. To give an example from a past migration project where SEO was vital, tasks included:

Pre-migration auditing, mapping and analysing links on the Drupal site;

Making further adjustments as directed by an SEO consultant after she analysed her webmaster tools.

Remember that SEO isn’t a one-time effort. The project needed multiple months of on-going work. Further, I was taking direction from the client’s SEO consultant who incurred her own separate fees. Thus the client allocated a sizeable budget for SEO alone. In his case it was worth the money because the Drupal site earned him many times that amount on revenue from search traffic. Minimising any negative impact on SEO after migrating to WordPress was a priority.

How much time and money you’ll need to allocate for your migration depends on a range of factors that are very specific to your site. You’ll only know after doing some in-depth analysis and documentation. Here’s an article on Search Engine Journal that I send to clients when they ask about the SEO impact of a CMS migration: How To Avoid SEO Disaster During a Website Redesign. It’s worth a read and afterwards you can think about how much SEO should play a part of your site migration project.

SEO considerations

What exactly will affect SEO during a typical Drupal to WordPress migration? Here are a few SEO considerations to keep in mind for your migration project. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list but paying attention to these points should cover the basics.

On-page SEO

A lot of the on-page SEO comes over as a natural side-effect of most content migration processes. For example, page titles, content keyword optimisation, sub-heading tags, image file names and internal linking are all embedded into the Drupal node content. These remain intact when the nodes are imported into WordPress, unless content cleaning or other manipulation is part of the project.

Other areas, such as URL structure, meta data and load speed will need work due to the differences of the two systems.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO will be unaffected by a CMS migration as long as you have the necessary redirects set up to catch URL changes for any backlinks. This is an effort that’s external to the site so not within the scope of this article.

Drupal aliases vs WordPress permalinks

URL structure is one of the SEO areas that will change after a CMS migration. A big part is because of some important differences between how Drupal and WordPress handle URLs. Drupal creates URLs using either the node ID or a URL alias stored in its database’s url_alias table. Take a look at some sample entries.

Drupal url_alias table

You’ll see an entry for node/28 associated with a URL alias projects/april. This means that under Drupal, the page with node ID 28 can be accessed using either http://example.com/node/28 or http://example.com/projects/april. Not shown is that content can have multiple aliases. The site could therefore also have another entry node/28 associated with URL alias projects-april and yet another with my-projects/april. You will always be able to find a page by appending the URL alias entry in the url_alias table to the site’s domain name.

WordPress has a different mechanism for creating URLs. Rather than relying on database entries, it generates rewrite rules and builds the permalink dynamically depending on your permalink settings. WordPress’ closest equivalent to the Drupal url_alias is its permalink slug stored as the post_name in the wp_posts table. Under my standard Drupal to WordPress migration, I migrate over the Drupal aliases by converting them into WordPress post name slugs. (See the table mapping in a separate article, Drupal to WordPress migration: posts table mapping.) If you have the Post name structure set in the WordPress Permalinks Settings, you’d then find the Project April page at either http://example.com/?p=28 or http://example.com/april/. Note that this would cause an SEO problem because the new WordPress link does not match the old Drupal link.

WordPress wp_posts table

We would have to do some extra work to solve this problem. For example, if the april node was a page, we could create and link to a parent Projects page to create the Drupal http://example.com/projects/april structure. Alternatively, if it was a post, we could create a projects category or tag and set the Category base or Tag base setting. We could also create .htaccess redirects or use one of the many WordPress redirection plugins. The exact solution would depend on your project’s requirements.

WordPress permalinks have more constraints

Aside from the differences in how URLs are stored and generated, you should also be aware of WordPress permalink constrains. These will have a big impact on the amount of work needed to preserve your Drupal SEO when migrating to WordPress. I’ll briefly summarise them below.

The Drupal URL alias has a 255 character limit but the WordPress the post_name field stores only 200 characters. Make sure to keep track of any truncated posts names and create a corresponding redirect.

Since there’s no WordPress equivalent of the Drupal url_alias table, you’ll need to decide which alias will be converted into the post name. You should create separate redirects for the other aliases.

WordPress slugs which create the permalink are essentially a URL-friendly version of the post title. WordPress automatically cleans up the post title to create slugs for new content but you may encounter problems when migrating Druapl aliases into slugs. Characters that would be valid within a Drupal alias are invalid as a WordPress slug. For example, you cannot have forward slashes, accented characters and quotes in your WordPress slug. You’ll need to clean up and keep track of any problem aliases, otherwise WordPress will not be able to serve the page.

As previously mentioned, under Drupal you will always be able to find a page by appending the URL alias entry to the site’s domain name. WordPress does not store any records of its URL structure. You will end up with broken links and a potential SEO nightmare if you change the Permalink structure settings without consideration.

Remember your Drupal taxonomies

It’s easy to forget Drupal’s powerful taxonomy system is capable of generating listings that attract valuable traffic. Use webmaster tools to audit your site traffic to pick up on any such listing pages. Unlike Drupal which allows for multiple vocabularies, WordPress only offers one set of categories and tags out of the box. Replicating your Drupal taxonomy listings in WordPress may take considerable development but a quick fix may be to manually replicate the important listings pages. Obviously the size of your site will dictate if this will be feasible.

Menu and breadcrumb navigation

Menu structure and breadcrumb navigation is often an important part of your SEO. Ensure that your selected WordPress theme both supports breadcrumbs (some don’t) and the same type of breadcrumbs e.g. hierarchy, attribute and history-based breadcrumbs.

Migrate metatags generated by Drupal metatag modules

Also remember that you may have installed modules that generate metatag information contributing to your SEO. Export these from the relevant Drupal table and import them into the WordPress database using the format for your preferred WordPress metatag plugin. For example, if you used the Drupal metatag module and would like to use the WordPress Add-Meta-Tags plugin, you’ll need to extract data from the metatags table and insert them into wp_postmeta table as a meta_key and meta_value pair. Keep in mind that some investigative work will be necessary to find out how your preferred modules and plugins store their data.

Search engine visibility

WordPress has a setting to discourage search engines from indexing site. It can be found in Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility. It’s normal to have this checked during development but make sure you disable it when launching.

Load speed

WordPress, in general, requires fewer hosting resources than Drupal. You could very well find that a slow site on an under-performing server running Drupal becomes more responsive under WordPress. Don’t take this for granted, however. Use the migration as an opportunity to make improvements. Thoroughly vet plugin candidates to make sure they’re not pulling in third-party scripts that will increase page load times. Also avoid bloated page-builder themes. In my experience, these can be terrible for load speed as they try to cram in every conceivable bit functionality, thereby drastically slowing down what could have been a nimble site.

Preserving SEO during a Drupal to WordPress migration can be lots of work

As may have gathered by now, the amount of work and budget needed will reply on many factors. It’s not possible to prescribe what will be necessary for your site without in-depth detail about your configuration and requirements. Nevertheless, I hopefully will have given you enough information to get started with planning an approach.

A little plug to keep the lights running. If you think all of this work is too much trouble, please consider hiring me for your Drupal to WordPress migration project.

From time-to-time I get clients who ask me to only export the content to a WordPress database, after which they’ll complete the remaining setup themselves. If this applies to your project, you can use these migration notes to help get your new WordPress site running properly.

Import the database dump file

Administrator credentials and email address

I will have changed your content management system (CMS) administrator password and email address to help with debugging. It’s important that you change these to your own as soon as possible.

Drupal and WordPress user passwords are encrypted so I won’t be able to view them. However, for your peace of mind, I recommend that you ask all your users to reset their passwords after your new WordPress site is live.

Server credentials

Please remember to change any database, (S)FTP, SSH server and control panel credentials you may have given me.

Migrating to a live server

I perform most Drupal to WordPress migrations on a development server. For help on how to move WordPress to your live server, please see: WordPress Codex: Moving WordPress.

Common errors after moving to a live server

Please see below for some common errors you may experience after migrating your new WordPress site to a new server.

Incorrect domain in URLs

WordPress stores domains in the database. If you performed the migration on a local or development server, there’s a good chance that the links will be incorrect after migrating to your live server. Use the Interconnect IT utility to run a search and replace on your database. This will also correct changed database prefixes.

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”

If you receive this error after logging in to your new WordPress installation, it’s possible that the database prefix on your new WordPress site is not set correctly. This may happen if you move your WordPress installation to a host that uses a different database prefix.

Try running one of the queries below. Replace wp_new_usermeta, oldprefix_ and newprefix_ as appropriate.

If you hired me to run a content export only, you’ll be responsible for setting up WordPress on your own server. Here are some notes to help you with importing the migrated WordPress database.

Import the database dump file

I will deliver either a MySQL database dump file or login credentials to the phpMyAdmin control panel for your project. The first thing you’ll need to do is import the WordPress database into your hosting environment.

Update the database for your domain

WordPress stores domain settings in the database. Since we run the migration and testing on a development server with a temporary sub-domain, you’ll need to update the settings to match your live domain. The easiest way to do this is to use a search and replace utility by Interconnect IT.

It’s pretty straight forward and only takes a few minutes. In the search and replace section:

Search for: the domain for your test server

Replace with: the domain for your live server

Change the login credentials

I use my own admin email address and password during the migration. For security, please change the administrator user details for your live site. After updating the domains, go directly to the login page to make additional adjustments.

http://YOUR-DOMAIN/wp-login.php

username: [Your username]

password: [Your password]

Your temporary administrator username and password will be sent separately.

Set your WordPress theme

Set the WordPress theme to one that you have installed. I use one of the standard WordPress themes for the migration. However, if the new WordPress site isn’t set to use to a theme you have installed and configured, you may get a blank screen while browsing the site.

When migrating Drupal terms into WordPress, it’s important to understand exactly what terms are and how the two systems handle categorising information.

A primer on Drupal taxonomies

One of Drupal’s most powerful features is its ability to organise content with taxonomies. Unfortunately, the taxonomy system is also notorious as one of the trickiest things about Drupal for beginners to understand. You can find a more detailed explanation here but essentially, a taxonomy is the practice and science of classifying things. In content management terms, you would mostly use taxonomies to organise and categorise articles or posts.

Taxonomies in Drupal uses the concept of vocabularies and terms. Terms are just a list of words that describe a particular type of content. They’re grouped together into vocabularies, which can be thought of as ‘containers’ for a set of terms. Vocabularies may be assigned to any content type. Drupal allows you to arrange the terms within a vocabulary using a parent-and-child hierarchical structure or they can be a flat list, with each term being on the same level as the others.

You can have many vocabularies in Drupal, each containing any number of terms. Vocabulary names must be unique and you cannot have duplicate term names within a vocabulary. It’s possible, however, to have the same term name appear in different vocabularies. Fig. 1 shows an example Drupal taxonomy with three vocabularies, Music, Movies and Books. The Movies and Books vocabularies both have the term Sci-Fi.

WordPress categories and tags

WordPress’ system for organising content is simpler. You have the option of categories–which can be hierarchical–and tags which are flat, or non-hierarchical. In general, categories in WordPress are used as a way of broadly organising posts and tags are used for more detailed descriptions.

Unlike Drupal, where you can have many containers in the form of vocabularies, a standard WordPress installation offers one container for categories and one for tags. Also as standard, categories and tags can only be assigned to the WordPress post content type. A WordPress developer can extend this by creating custom content types with their own categories and tags.

Migrating Drupal terms as WordPress categories and tags

When running a Drupal to WordPress migration, we need to map Drupal’s more complex multi-vocabulary taxonomy system into the simpler WordPress model of categories and tags. How we do this depends on how you want to organise your new WordPress site. For example, we can:

It’s all up to you and we figure this out during the requirements gathering stage of the project. For many sites, converting Drupal vocabulary names into WordPress categories and Drupal term names into WordPress tags, as shown in Fig. 3, seems to be the most sensible option. The important thing to know is that the migration may require us to ‘collapse’ or combine your taxonomies.

Fig 3: Merging Drupal taxonomies into WordPress

Since WordPress doesn’t support duplicate category or tag names, another thing to consider is how to handle any duplicate Drupal terms. Normally, the easiest solution is to append a unique number so that you can filter them out post-migration. We can do some clever merging and re-assigning of terms to posts but frankly, it’s probably not worth incurring the extra fees. Unless you have a great number of duplicates, you can probably do the job yourself quite easily via the WordPress Dashboard controls.

Organising your categories and tags in WordPress

Now that we know what’s involved in converting Drupal’s taxonomy over to WordPress, the next obvious question would be, “What’s the best way to structure categories and tags in WordPress?” While I cannot prescribe exactly how you should organise your site, I can point you to this excellent article so you can decide for yourself: Categories vs Tags – SEO Best Practices for Sorting your Content. Generally you should only have a few categories, maybe five or ten in total. Any more and they can become unwieldy and difficult to manage. These categories will reflect the main themes of your site. Tags can then further describe the details of each post and link specific topics together. You can have any number of tags.

The chances are that you probably want to avoid any drastic changes to the site structure when migrating from Drupal to WordPress. A simple mapping of vocabularies to categories and terms to tags is usually the closest equivalent in WordPress.

A Drupal to WordPress migration can sound daunting, especially if you have a large or long-established site. From my experience, a migration project is actually not very difficult in terms of technical challenge. It can, however, be time-consuming, tedious and sometimes finicky with the data mappings. It’s my job to make the process easy for you.

To help with this, I write custom scripts to automate the bulk of your content migration. Once we have most of the data transferred, we can refine different aspects of the new WordPress site until you feel the job is done. These scripts save time by allowing us to repeatedly run the migration steps after building-in layers of improvements.

The thing to remember is that it’s often unnecessary to make an exact copy of your Drupal site in WordPress. We only need to prioritise the highest value content and functionality. Following the Pareto principle, or the 80–20 rule, 80% of your site’s value may come from only 20% of what’s in your Drupal installation. We can expend time and budget on getting everything into WordPress but it might not be worth the investment. The migration is therefore be a good time to clean-up your site of any un-needed bloat. Your main challenge during the migration project is to understand which parts of your Drupal site is valuable so you can instruct me on what to convert into WordPress.

Questions to define migration requirements

To help focus your efforts at the beginning of your Drupal to WordPress migration, here’s list of questions to ask yourself or your content management team:

Which content types do you want to migrate?

Which of the above content types should be converted to WordPress pages and which should be converted to WordPress posts? If you’re unfamiliar with the differences between posts and pages, see Post vs. Page on the WordPress support site.

Do you want to convert your existing design into a WordPress theme, do you want to design new theme or will you be happy with a ready-made theme?

How much of the Drupal site’s functionality can be replicated by existing WordPress plugins? If you’re willing to be flexible, it might be unnecessary to build any custom plugins

What’s needed to get started

Many of the above are simply things to think about during the early stages of the project. We won’t need answers to them immediately. To get started on a Drupal to WordPress migration, just send me the following:

A MySQL dump file or access to your database.

How you want to divide up the content types into pages and posts.

How you want to divide up the terms into categories and tags.

Once we’re underway, I will guide you on what’s needed for each step of the process.

In a Drupal to WordPress migration post by Sam Michel, reader Jean-Philippe commented that why he couldn’t find the tables mentioned. I started composing my reply but for some reason the page wouldn’t let me post.

Rather than waste the time it took to compose the reply, I thought it would be good to post it here instead.

Hi Jean-Philippe,

This probably isn’t relevant to you anymore but I’m posting this for the benefit of anyone else who stumbles across your comment.

The tables names have changed in Drupal 7. ‘taxonomy_term_data’ and ‘taxonomy_term_hierarchy’ are all Drupal 7 tables. If you don’t see the tables mentioned in this post, it’s almost certainly because you don’t have Drupal 6 installed.

In Drupal 7, ‘term_node’ has been replaced with ‘taxonomy_index’.

I’ve started documenting the table mapping between Drupal and WordPress in a series of posts here: https://anothercoffee.net/drupal-to-wordpress-migration-posts-table-mapping/

Since I also used Scott Anderson’s SQL, anyone reading Sam Michel’s series might find it useful too. (Thanks to Sam and Scott!)

Node authors and comment authors

Drupal stores both node authors and comment authors in the users table. WordPress handles things differently. Page and post authors are stored in the wp_users table but comment authors are stored in wp_comments together with the comment data.